Chip Kelly – photo by Andy Lewis / contrasphotography.com

Eagles Head Coach Chip Kelly Press Conference
11.23.15

Q. Did it look any better the second time around?
CHIP KELLY: No, it didn’t. It did not look better the second time around. Fortunately for us we’ve got a game on Thursday, so we’ve got to move on and get ready to play Detroit right now.

Q. Is QB Sam Bradford going to practice today?
CHIP KELLY: We’ll see what happens when he goes out on the field. I’m done with the updates. You guys will see him on the field; you guys can get it then. I gave you an update last week and I was wrong, so I don’t want to be wrong again.

Q. You’re the head coach of the team and this is your starting quarterback. You don’t know if he’ll be practicing today?
CHIP KELLY: We’ll see what he can do on the field today.

Q. Yesterday you said that you guys weren’t ready to play on defense. This morning on the radio you said you didn’t remember saying that.
CHIP KELLY: Whatever I said. We didn’t play well defensively, that’s exactly what I meant. Whether I said we weren’t ready, however it was, we didn’t play well defensively, and obviously it was reflected in what Tampa Bay did to us offensively.

Q. Why is LB Kiko Alonso playing 54 snaps on defense?
CHIP KELLY: That’s the rotation we have at the inside linebacker spot.

Q. Is he good enough to start right now?
CHIP KELLY: To play a whole game? I’m not sure about that.

Q. Is his knee still bothering him?
CHIP KELLY: I still think we’re bringing him along in terms of him progressing. The same thing with [LB] DeMeco [Ryans], too; I don’t think DeMeco can play a full game right now.

Q. Any thought of shutting Alonso down at this point?
CHIP KELLY: No, there’s no thought about that at all.

Q. How was the decision made that T Jason Peters would play?
CHIP KELLY: He went out and worked out early before the game. He felt like he was good to go, and he was cleared by the doctors.

Q. Who made the final decision that he would play?
CHIP KELLY: Ultimately, I make the final decision on who the inactives and actives are.

Q. So you make that decision, and then how about in the game? Who decided that he would no longer play?
CHIP KELLY: We all did. We talked about where we were —

Q. He said that he made the decision?
CHIP KELLY: Yeah, because I get input from him on how he feels. So we have a discussion on how he feels, but I’m not going to make a player go play if he tells me he’s hurting.

Q. Defensive Coordinator Bill Davis was very hard on himself in regards to the way he coached yesterday and his calls. What’s your confidence level in Bill Davis right now?
CHIP KELLY: I’ve got tremendous confidence in Billy Davis. I think he’s a hell of a football coach.

Q. WR Josh Huff was only targeted one time, and that was on the 39-yard touchdown. Did he have some sort of injury during the game or is there any other explanation?
CHIP KELLY: No, just kind of how it expressed in the game with what coverage dictates and how they’re doing it. They played a lot of Cover 2 against us, so they had guys up in the face of our outside receivers, two safeties high over the top. So obviously you’re going to work the ball inside a little bit more against that coverage.

Q. Do you have to make a concerted effort though when a guy has a big play like that to get him involved later in the game?
CHIP KELLY: Well, they were playing man coverage on him. We didn’t see much man after that; we saw a lot more Cover 2 after that, and I think maybe that was the reason for that. To make a concerted effort to throw a ball to an outside receiver in Cover 2 is not very smart. To say that, ‘They did that on that specific play,’ we caught them in man coverage; [WR] Josh [Huff] ran over a good slant route; [QB] Mark [Sanchez] put it on him, and we didn’t see much man after that. We saw a ton of Cover 2 in that game, which, obviously by the score, I think people do that. They’re going to play back a little bit; they’re going to play more zones; try to keep the ball in front of them. And they did a very good job of doing it.

Q. When you’re struggling to make big plays and you’re struggling to gain momentum, is there any thought to move Huff around in the offense like moving him to the inside or putting him in the backfield? Just getting different looks?
CHIP KELLY: Well, Josh has never practiced in the backfield, so on Game Day to say, ‘Hey, let’s move a guy to a position he’s never played,’ that’s just not good football.

Q. Huff only got 17 snaps, though, and WR Miles Austin —
CHIP KELLY: I thought he had more than that. I’ll look at the numbers.

Q. Huff had 17 —
CHIP KELLY: But he was rotating with [WR] Nelson [Agholor] on the other side. Again, a lot of it is coverage dictated. So if you watch the tape, we didn’t get much man free after that snap. Specifically, it was a lot more Cover 2 with two high safeties and guys rolled up on the outside receivers.

Q. What went in to the change at nickel?
CHIP KELLY: We thought the match-ups — talking to Billy [defensive coordinator Bill Davis] and Cory [defensive backs coach Cory Undlin] and what they wanted to do with the match-ups and trying to get Biggs [CB E.J. Biggers] on the field and keeping [S] Malcolm [Jenkins] at safety.

Q. Is this where you expected to be 10 games into your third season?
CHIP KELLY: No, not at all. No one is happy about what our record is right now, and all we can do about it is prepare and get ready to play Detroit.

Q. Wasn’t having S Malcolm Jenkins in the slot deemed a success?
CHIP KELLY: Every time we play nickel, we determine what the match-up is like and who the best match-up is. If you look at Biggs, Biggs has done a nice job when he has been matched up there on some of the things we did, and going into this game, that was the game plan going in. We felt the match-up with Biggs in there — I don’t think the match-up was good for anybody on our defensive side of the ball.

Q. Why did DE Taylor Hart play 32 snaps, 10 of which came on the pass rush?
CHIP KELLY: We have a rotation that goes on in our defensive line in terms of who’s in and who’s out, and that’s the way they’ve always rotated. It has been like that most of the season. I would think the numbers are pretty close to where they are most of the season.

Q. With respect to Peters and making the call whether he’s going to play or not, how much consideration do you have to give to T Lane Johnson and the fact that he would have to switch sides?
CHIP KELLY: I give it to injury of the player, so that’s not a consideration. I think the question keeps coming up, but if a player tells me he can’t play, I don’t have the trump card to say, ‘You can play.’ You know what I mean? It doesn’t work that way.

Q. I understand that —
CHIP KELLY: In terms of where we are, we have great confidence in how we do things, what Jason gets in walk-through and how many reps he got. We did get practice out of him last week, and we feel real confident. He has been in the league for a long time, so we’re very confident in him in playing that.

Lane has the ability to go both sides. Lane is more comfortable playing, actually, on the right side because he has got more experience on the right side.

Q. In QB Mark Sanchez’s case, why do these interceptions keep coming?
CHIP KELLY: Again, as we say it all the time, everyone is an individual throw. I think sometimes it is the expected coverage, what he thought. And then you’ve got to get a chance as a quarterback coach, a coordinator and head coach to sit down with the film and go through all that with Mark.

Q. What happened on the interception before the half when Sanchez threw it to TE Brent Celek?
CHIP KELLY: We were just squeezed on the tight end, and I think he thought he could have got it in there.

Q. What should he have done differently there?
CHIP KELLY: Not thrown it to Tampa Bay.

Q. Did he have open receivers?
CHIP KELLY: Yeah, he did.

Q. You guys were No. 3 in the league in run defense going into Carolina. You’re No. 25 now after four weeks. When you look at film, what do you see happening that wasn’t happening?
CHIP KELLY: I think when you look at the game specifically, and I’ll just go back to the other games, but it was four runs; four runs, I think, for 185.

Q. They had almost 300.
CHIP KELLY: I know, but those four runs were the big — we have not done that before. People have hit us for six, seven, eight, but we haven’t had runs break and get out the backside and go for the distance that they went for. And that was the thing in terms of that. We’ve got to do a better job tackling; we’ve got to do a better job in our fits in terms of where we’re going to be in gap defense.

Q. Buccaneers LB Lavonte David said after the game that almost immediately after the snap he knew the screen was coming his way on the pick-six. How concerned are you about the predictability of your offense right now?
CHIP KELLY: I don’t think that — we’re talking the 70th snap of the game or the 68th snap of the game, so at that point in time, they’re playing deep zones. Usually when we’re in that long yardage, we haven’t really thrown — except for the two daggers we threw to Coop [WR Riley Cooper]. We’re trying to get the ball down the field, and our most successful thing at that point in time, we had hit a screen earlier for a touchdown for a 35-yard gain. We had another big gain on it. The one we missed with [RB] Darren [Sproles], I think, would have been another big gain. We had an opportunity for it. So I would say four times we were right and one time he was right and he made a great play on the play, so that’s a credit to him.

Q. With TE Zach Ertz’s concussion, do you need to add a tight end?
CHIP KELLY: I don’t know. Zach is in the [concussion] protocol right now. He has been cleared to go to meetings, and we’ll see where that clears as the week goes along here. We do know we’re on a short week, though.

Q. Are you worried about players pointing fingers at each other when you see guys yelling at each other?
CHIP KELLY: No, that’s just two very competitive guys in Darren and Mark, and [special teams coordinator] Dave [Fipp] patched it up. I think they’re both frustrated, but I’m not worried about that, overall, as a team. I think that happens, and you look at it all the time.

It’s funny, when you win and that happens, everybody says, ‘Those two guys are really competitive.’ When [Patriots QB] Tom Brady yells at [Patriots WR] Julian Edelman and they win the game, [people are talking about] what a competitor the quarterback is. If it happens when you’re losing, there’s in-fighting. But it was an isolated incident between two highly competitive players, and nothing else came of it. Those guys will both tell you the same thing.

Q. Because of what happened, do players like LB Najee Goode and LB Emmanuel Acho maybe merit some more playing time?
CHIP KELLY: Right now I think with the short week, we’re going to go with what we had last week. We’ve got to prepare and get ready to play a game against Detroit, so we’re not making any lineup moves at this point in time.

Q. Are you gaining enough production from your top two draft picks, WR Nelson Agholor and DB Eric Rowe?
CHIP KELLY: Well, I think Nelson has been hurt, so that’s part of what happened in terms of where he is. And then we’re starting to get Eric in there. He played outside corner for us in dime yesterday. It really depended on what packages Billy [defensive coordinator Bill Davis] is using on that side of the ball and how we match up with those guys. So we’ll see where that goes as we continue to go through the season.

Q. What kind of emphasis is put on relationship building with the players? Do you feel like you have a tight enough bond with them to see through a nasty downturn?
CHIP KELLY: Yeah, I mean, that’s what this deal is all about. We’re with our players consistently. We spend a lot of time with our players in individual position meetings, group settings, and all of those things. So we lost a football game. I don’t think it’s time to say, ‘Hey, we don’t believe ‘this’ is ‘this’.’ We got outplayed; we got outcoached; didn’t do a good job coaching in that football game, and that’s what it is. But that’s all it is, and we need to move forward. It’s not, we need to change set up our day or do anything like that.

I think we lost a game to a better team. We were outcoached. We’re going to move on and get ready to play Detroit.

Q. You said you don’t like to raise your voice to the players because they’re grown men, but as the head coach, you can make personnel decisions. I understand it’s a short week, but over the last two weeks, have you contemplated anything about making personnel changes?
CHIP KELLY: No, not at all.

Q. And why not?
CHIP KELLY: Because I feel confident in the guys we have right now.

Q. The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and getting the same results —
CHIP KELLY: I’ve never heard that before. Thanks for sharing that with us.

Q. Well, it’s Einstein.
CHIP KELLY: Okay.

Q. But do you ever look —
CHIP KELLY: We lost two games. I think sometimes people panic and throw the baby out with the bath water. I think we have a really good football team, and I’m very confident in those football players.